“Developer Evangelist”: Not Two Years Old — More Like Three Decades!

In the past two years, the explosion in web technologies and apps has created a new profession: It’s called Developer Evangelism, and it’s seriously awesome.

The “seriously awesome” part is correct. The “two years” part is waaaay off. The title “developer evangelist” has been around since the 1980s when people at Apple first started using it. It was coined by Apple’s Mike Murray, the title was first held by Mike Boich and it was popularized by Guy Kawasaki. Since then, other people have taken up the title, most notably Robert Scoble, who was a tech evangelist at Microsoft in the early 2000s (Microsoft created a whole division in 2001 called Developer & Platform Evangelism, for which I worked from late 2008 through early 2011).